I’ve been trying to understand this fossil for more than twenty years. The femur and ulna are the first real clues about its locomotion, but specialists who have studied the bones all disagree about what they say. I took a deep dive to understand the big picture. www.johnhawks.net/p/how-sahela...

A Howler Monkey enjoying its vegetables this afternoon at @casabentbill.bsky.social #CostaRica #monkeys #nature #wildlife

Reducing human value to what we can be trained to do is straight up technofascism. Every fascism has its suhumans. To technofascists, humans are the subhumans.

My latest for @arstechnica.com explores what it means that we have 1.77 million year-old Homo erectus fossils in central China, and whether Homo erectus was really the first hominin to migrate that far. 🧪

My interview with @manymindspod.bsky.social! Come for a deep dive into the evolution of kissing 💋, stay for the earth-shattering insights 🤯 "fish don't run" 🐠🏃 "monkeys tend to loll around quite a lot" 🙈 "chimps have moved on to grass-in-bumhole behaviour" 🍑🌱 disi.org/origins-of-t...

UK: Prince Andrew arrested. South Korea: Former President Yoon sentenced for life. Brazil: Former President Bolsonaro serving a 27-year sentence. USA: President Trump demands $10 billion payout from taxpayers.

We are torpedoing a major advancement in vaccine development & public health due to fringe ideas and misinformation about the dangers of mRNA vaccine technologies. We will regret this & future generations will look back at this moment and wonder what the hell we were thinking.

Research Associate job.

I’ve been flying for decades and the Brachiosaurus skeleton at O’Hare is the coolest fucking thing I’ve seen at any airport

Salary £54,931-£64,644. UCL Institute of Archaeology.

Remind me again why even democratic administrations have gone out of their way to allow this company to accumulate billions of tax payer dollars and insinuate itself into multiple aspects of governance?

🗃️ Tyler Austin Harper’s insane Andrew Mellon Foundation hit piece, which of course @theatlantic.com was happy to print, has rightfully pissed off everyone in the Humanities. As someone who works in higher education funding, here is a 🧵 on why this article is even more infuriating than you think.

We must speak plainly about the agenda Elon Musk & other MAGA leaders are pushing. It’s white nationalism. There’s no room for Black, Hispanic/Latino, Asian, Native, Jewish or all other Americans in Musk’s monocultural vision. Multiculturalism is superior. We can’t allow Musk & others to end it.

NEW: Read this terrific piece @virginiaheffernan.bsky.social for @thenerve.news in which she unpicks Edge.org, the hugely influential 'salon' funded by Epstein & threaded through with race science & eugenics. 1/ www.thenerve.news/p/epstein-bi...

This thread seems to confirm my very strong prior that a big part of what's wrong with DHS is that it blurs foreign and domestic authority, and by doing so inherently promotes bringing military and intelligence behavior into the civilian world

it’s Valentines Day youtu.be/S4R8HTIgHUU?...

They could build a wall around Vought’s home out of the bones of all the children killed from cutting USAID

“His conversations from a decade ago provide clues as to how race science was picked out of the boneyard of history and reanimated into a force that’s influencing U.S. politics right now.”

Happy birthday to Charles Darwin, patron saint of tired scientists, grumpy fieldworkers, and hating your own manuscript.

This episode has been a nightmare for my city and state, but I hope people realize it’s also a profound defeat and political catastrophe for Trump and DHS, who are slinking away having accomplished nothing. Minneapolis simply wouldn’t bend to them and they lost

If it were about another place the framing would be: “Empire in decline cannot provide public services and citizens must resort to homeschooling as education and healthcare infrastructure crumbles. Homeschooling is rebranded as positive in a desperate attempt to ward off parental despair.”

Annual Darwin Day reminder that even great minds have their shitty days: "But I am very poorly today and hate everybody and everything" —Charles Darwin, 1861 www.npr.org/sections/kru...

Some children in Dilley were so distraught they cut themselves or talked about suicide, parents told ProPublica. They said kids lost their appetites after finding worms and mold on their food, had trouble sleeping, and were constantly sick.

How do we know our research results are REAL? We replicate them! Most folks agree but lament on how hard it is to publish these replications. My dearest gentle reader, lament no more! Delighted to unveil: Replication Studies, a new section of Behavioral Ecology 1/ academic.oup.com/beheco/artic...

Evil men like Epstein are, in the simplest form, obsessed with eugenics because they believe that their ill-gotten gains are the product of some innate superiority.

It is absolutely outrageous that Moderna’s flu vaccine was met with a “refusal-to-file” even after their approved their protocol with FDA and carried out the trial as agreed. This vaccine works better in older adults than the current flu vaccines. apnews.com/article/mode...

people born in america probably don’t realize how cool america used to be. the death of US soft power is going to have long term consequences we are only beginning to see

ICE has now spent over half a BILLION dollars just on purchasing warehouses around the country to convert into detention camps. If these mega-camps are utilized to the full capacity ICE intends, they'll be the largest prisons in the country, with little real oversight. www.ajc.com/politics/202...

𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝘁𝗮𝗹𝗸 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗰𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗲𝘃𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗻𝗼𝘄? Because many of the biggest open questions in neuroscience still revolve around the cerebral cortex — how it emerged, expanded, diversified, and why it differs so much across species. #CorticalEvolution2026

Crockett: "The US is falling apart, partially bc he's allowing for killings in the street, but also bc we have a 34 count convicted felon being shielded from any type of accountability as it relates to a child sex trafficking ring. I don't understand why we're pretending any of this is normal."

"Whiteness" isn't really about sunlight or skin, it is the category that was created to constitute a legally and socially privileged group of European immigrants in contrast to enslaved Africans and indentured Asians.

New excavations at the Grotta Guattari, just south of Rome, have yielded beautiful new Neanderthal fossils. They may add a lot to our knowledge of how Neanderthals maintained their populations as they fled the advance of the ice sheets. www.johnhawks.net/p/a-neandert...

Keen on excavating some Neanderthal sites in Spain? Well, today is your lucky day! Call for participants at Roca dels Bous site just opened. Excavations on this unique Neanderthal site will run 1-20th August (both inclusive). For further information and details, contact me!

I put on my bio anth hat to co-write this piece with @nicolanese.bsky.social, our excellent health editor at Live Science. 🧪🏳️‍⚧️

Developmental roots of cortical bone distribution and mandibular robusticity in early hominins anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Two posts in a day!!! Not usual for me. But, here is a short, fun piece I co-wrote with @leosapien.bsky.social for @us.theconversation.com on how the weather conditions at this year's Winter Olympics affect athletes' bodies and gear: theconversation.com/winter-olymp...

Pour one out for every professional political pundit, writer, consultant whatever that has spent the last decade trying to pretend that the Trump phenomenon was about trade or opiates and not a big chunk of white america losing its mind over having a black president bsky.app/profile/kyle...

Charles Lyell's book Antiquity of Man was published #OnThisDay in 1863. It argued that humans once lived alongside extinct animals like mammoths, meaning we have a deep past. It also examined the original Neanderthal.

Is this what The Employee of the Month deserves?

Imagination in bonobos! I am thrilled to share a new paper w/ Amalia Bastos, out now in @science.org We provide the first experimental evidence that a nonhuman animal can follow along a pretend scenario & track imaginary objects. Work w/ Kanzi, the bonobo, at Ape Initiative youtu.be/NUSHcQQz2Ko

Childhood was a political project, centuries of activism carving out time and space for young people to grow and learn. It's an unfinished project, and the right wing wants it ended when it's barely even begun.

This guy is one of the most powerful people in the world and one of the most dangerous, vile, hateful, and deluded (assuming he really believes this stuff, which he seems to) fortune.com/2026/02/04/p...

New paper by PI Dr. Noreen von Cramon-Taubadel and former BHEML postdoc Dr. Lauren Schroeder! The human chin is a unique; investigating why and how it formed helps us to better understand ourselves and our lineage! journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

My lab is looking to recruit 1-2 paid summer interns to do wet lab work on learning in a unicellular organism (Stentor coeruleus). You can apply here: forms.gle/b47WpSobjFjo...

Job alert in Malta on my ERC funded IslandLab Project for a post excavation research assistant. A bachalor's degree in Archaeology, or related fields is required, ideally with experience working on faunal assemblages and handling bones/fossils, and curating finds. www.um.edu.mt/media/um/doc...

Really wonderful story about Lazarus Kgasi, a leader in South African paleontology at the Ditsong Museum of Natural History. www.npr.org/2026/02/04/g...

The history of evolutionary ideas about chins took me to Darwin, Pliny the Elder, Stephen Jay Gould, and Theodore Roosevelt. It's an irresistable subject that has befuddled scientists all this time. www.johnhawks.net/p/what-the-h...

New article! "Changing the Landscape of Archaeological Publishing" in Current Anthropology, by a giant collaborative group of coauthors fearlessly led by Jess Beck and including @bridgetalex.bsky.social @benmarwick.bsky.social @christinawarinner.bsky.social www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10....